Thursday, August 03, 2017

I felt the blood drain out of my hands, and felt a surge of blood from the front of my brain to the back. I wondered for a second if I was going to stroke out. And we even ended early, reaching only 50 mph.

These are race car accelerations! Still, the challenging roller coasters can reach 4g, and fighter pilots have worse to deal with. But for a civilian car, quite a shock!

This is fascinating! She was one of the candidates in the 2003 CA Gubernatorial Recall Election (which I ran in as well):

"This one," he said, pointing at a 1967 Monroe Senior High School sophomore from the San Fernando Valley, third from right, "is Angelyne." A schoolgirl with hooded eyes and long center-parted locks, in a button-down white shirt and tie, stared out across half a century. "Also known as Renee Goldberg."

The Hollywood Reporter has since independently confirmed this is Angelyne's real identity with public records and family members. Far from the archetypal transplant-with-a-dream, as she has tacitly long alluded, she's the locally raised daughter of Holocaust survivors, a Jew who has found refuge in shiksa drag. It's a fascinating, only-in-L.A. story of identity, history and a symbiotic yearning both to be forgotten and to be famous.

...Copies of immigration, marriage and death records pointed to a cloaked prehistory of Renee Tami Goldberg (originally Ronia Tamar Goldberg), which seems to reveal the trauma Angelyne had both emerged and escaped from. She was born in Poland on Oct. 2, 1950, the daughter of Polish Jews who'd met in the Chmielnik ghetto during World War II — they were among 500 to survive out of a population of 13,000, the rest sent to death at Treblinka. According to the documentation — obtained from the International Tracing Service, established by the Red Cross as an archive of Nazi crimes — her parents, Hendrik (aka Heniek or Henryk) Goldberg and Bronia (aka Bronis) Zernicka, endured unimaginable horrors at a series of concentration camps, first together at Skarzysko, where prisoners' main job was to make munitions, and then apart at the 20th century's most infamous hellscapes, including Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen.

...They boarded a ship leaving Haifa for New York and settled in L.A.'s Fairfax District. Her father worked as a tool-and-die mechanic. Then, in 1965, her 44-year-old mother died of cancer. Goldberg was 14.

The next year Hendrik (now Henry) remarried another Holocaust survivor, a seamstress divorcee named Deborah, and Goldberg acquired a younger stepsister, Norma. She and her father moved from the Westside to Panorama City, deep in the San Fernando Valley, where she'd begin high school and Henry and Deborah would run a strip-mall liquor store in nearby Van Nuys. She'd have a brief marriage to the son of a Beverly Hills executive, living in Hollywood with him. Goldberg's paper trail ends with their divorce in 1969.

...Angelyne had single-handedly created and then inhabited a modern myth of L.A.: the platinum blond bombshell in the bright pink Corvette forever circumnavigating the city, seeking to enchant by dint of her sheer superficial glamour. It had the aesthetic power and emotional resonance of genuine performance art, Marina Abramovic by way of John Waters, particularly as she kept on rambling around the city over the decades while she aged.

“Alt-Right” activists charter a boat to disrupt migrant rescues in the Mediterranean, and get caught trafficking migrants:

The members were stopped in and deported from a sea port in the self-declared Turkish state of Northern Cyprus Thursday after spending two days in detention for document forgery and potential human trafficking of 20 Sri Lankan nationals who were aboard the C-Star, the campaign’s ship. Turkish Cypriot authorities deported nine crew members, including the ship’s captain and a German “second captain” believed to be neo-Nazi Alexander Schleyer. The authorities also transferred the director of the company that owns the ship, Sven Tomas Egerstrom, to Greek-controlled Cyprus for further questioning.

Monday, July 31, 2017

Time to break out the pink underwear and prepare a cot in the hot Arizona sun! Sleazeball Joe Arpaio is now a convict:

(CNN)The lawman who once boasted he was "America's toughest sheriff," could find himself behind bars after a federal judge found him guilty of criminal contempt on Monday.

Former Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio was accused of violating a court order in a racial profiling case by continuing patrols targeting immigrants. US District Court Judge Susan Bolton handed down her verdict in court papers signed on Monday.

Bolton wrote that Arpaio knew of the court order and what it meant for his department's policy of detaining immigrants to turn them over to federal immigration authorities. But the evidence showed "a flagrant disregard" for the order, Bolton wrote.

"Not only did defendant abdicate responsibility, he announced to the world and to his subordinates that he was going to continue business as usual no matter who said otherwise," Bolton wrote.

The image speaks for itself; it is an astounding shot of the microburst at the exact moment it crashed down from the heavens — 4:34 PM Mountain Daylight Time on Wednesday, over El Paso. The local National Weather Service office found itself in the bull’s eye, with one meteorologist scrambling up to a nearby mountain to snap some other shots of the colossal downburst.

The photo above, captured from a plane by El Paso resident Alfredo Maldonado, is gorgeous; it shows the rush of air dropping to the ground and fanning out in all directions. “I was flying from El Paso to Denver,” Maldonado said. “The flight was on time. It was smooth — no turbulence whatsoever, no wind, no rain.”

But just a few miles away, Maldonado spotted what appeared to be a plume of “water dumping from the sky.”

“I had never seen something so isolated,” he said. His children had the window seat, but he immediately thought to snap this picture — and the weather community is extremely glad he did.

“Just seeing the raw power of Mother Nature was incredible. We could see what almost looked like little waves or ripples where it was hitting the ground,” Maldonado said. “It’s been rainy for the past week, which is always a relief in the desert. Usually we can see where the storms are hitting, and some have flash floods, so these are known to come with force, but this one looked different.”

Microbursts are so dangerous. I recall reading about an airliner takeoff in Tucson in 1976. A microburst hit the runway during takeoff roll. The airliner couldn't gain altitude at first in the downdraft, and actually hit power lines. Then it reached the edge of the downdraft, with its curlicue of rising air, and was saved.